Critical Essay by Richard Harter Fogle

SOURCE: "The Minister's Black Veil," in Hawthorne's Fiction: The Light and the Dark, University of Oklahoma Press, 1952, pp. 33-40.

In the following essay, Fogle argues that Hawthorne failed to achieve the full potential of "The Minister's Black Veil."

Hawthorne's characteristic fusion of surface simplicity and underlying complexity is perhaps nowhere more clearly evident than in "The Minister's Black Veil," a brief, highly typical, and thoroughly successful story. It is subtitled "A Parable," and the outer meaning of the parable is abundantly clear. An apparently blameless minister inexplicably dons a black veil and wears it throughout his lifetime, despite many well-meant pleas to cast it off. On his deathbed he reveals its secret and its justification:

What, but the mystery which it obscurely typifies, has made this piece of crape so awful? When the friend shows his inmost heart...